Is it real? I mean, really real?

I didn't grow up rich. Most of the toys I made were homemade. I remember I actually made myself a little wooden Tommy gun and ran around my parent's yard shooting up the place. I had a few other little things, swords, crossbows, all that I made from the woods behind the house. They were pretty good for a kid with no attention span and only the most rudimentary understanding of power tools.

But what made up for the quality of the items, was the fact that I transported myself when I was using them. I really had a lot of fun, pretending to play war, or building a survival hut out in the middle of "the wilderness" all of 500 feet from my house. But that didn't matter. The sense of accomplishment I felt when I came back in from "winning the war" or "being rescued" wasn't diminished by the fact it wasn't real. I admit, I don't know what it's like to actually accomplish those things, but I'd imagine they're comprable to what I felt.

As I got older, as I think most of us did, I stopped wanting the purely infantile excitement of imagined accomplishment. I wanted to achieve in reality. I started doing better in school, started looking for opportunities to make a difference in my neighborhood, I plugged into a few volunteer organizations, and all with the expectation that I'd find that certain satisfaction that I felt as a kid. I'd say I came close. But as with most nostalgic memories, I never got it quite right....

I think that what I came to realize is that what I needed wasn't a real accomplishment, but rather the feeling of accomplishment. One that was relevant to my context. If I hung out with a bunch of football players and bragged about how I read Sowell's "Basic Economics" when I was 12 I doubt that'd mean the same thing as it would to a bunch of bookworms. Our accomplishments are entirely based off our context. That's why video games are so powerful. Video games not only provide easy to achieve goals, but they provide a context in which those goals are important. When I'm saving the universe, that feels important. Despite the fact that the universe I'm saving is a bunch of ones and zeros on a magnetic disc.

But does the fact that it wasn't real diminish any part of our personal satisfaction? I don't think it does, at least not to a huge extent. Especially when we understand the context of videogames to be something we inheritantly seek out for a sense of satisfaction. Much like a drug, videogames give us the feeling that we want from them. They enable some aprt of our brain to latch on to sensory information and tell us that we're doing a "good job. And that we're achieveing. That feeling, like a drug, is still real. It's a chemical reaction happening in our brain. But the fact is that the reason it's happening isn't what people call "real". But if I played videogames for what was "real" I wouldn't be playing videogames.

The bottom line is that I enjoy the "false" sense of accomplishment I get when I defend Gondor from Sauron. I like it when I hear the Halo announcer tell me I've gotten a "Killing Spree". I feel good when I see "100%" complete on a game's statistic. That means something in my own personal context. Whether or not a college profesor would advocate that this is "meaningful" is irrelevant  I like it. And in the end, that's the entire premise of gaming.

Are we losing our sense of creativity?

Are we running out of good ideas?

I've been gaming for a while, so I've seen the industry develop. While I'm not an expert, just a fan of games, I like to think that we have

Dis gat go blat blat blat

 And recently there's been a startling trend in one of my favorite genres, first person shooters. If you've paid attention to Bungie, who guys who brought us the beloved Halo series, they're working on a new title: Destiny. Destiny is a futuristic first person shooter... Like Halo... Like the last Call of Duty... Like a lot of other games, think Crysis and Aliens: Colonial Marines. We are being confronted with a pattern, we've already made plenty of war games from history, the original Call of Duty's, the Battlefield's, the Red Orchestra's, and before the turn of the century isn't prime real estate for video games. Remember the god awful attempt by the history channel to make a Civil War FPS? Spending a realistic amount of time reloading a musket doesn't sound like an enthralling game play mechanic. And it wasn't.

Unless it's a survival horror game where the lack of action adds to the suspense and overall atmosphere, FPS games tend to require more action packed, fast pace, ball breaking, combat. Players enjoy being immersed into a warzone, where their alertness and relaxes are on call for survival. It's the thrill of being integrated into a living situation, where your participation impacts the outcome of the battle. Think about Planetside 2. MMOFPS's aren't common, but since I started playing Planetside, I completely see the advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is that you are literally part of an alive battle field. Armored convoys, air support, infantry movements, all unscripted and genuine results of individuals, give the player the sense that they are really in a war. I also feel completely useless. With over a hundred people in a battle, your kill or two wont change much in the grand sceme of things. Especially when their spawn point is right behind them, just as far away as yours is. Even Planetside shows us the imitations of our "strip mining" of settings. It's set in the future, where you can deploy anywhere on a planet by clicking a button called "instant action". It drops you into combat (which is necessary for MMOFPS's cause who wants to walk all that way?) but what happens in a game where you don't have that technology in the setting? How would you make a WWII game? Parachutes? Maybe. But I think this is evidence of a more systemic problem.

Game mechanics can't be divorced from their setting. Otherwise people will complain that the game doesn't make sense. But with the expectations of excitement players have from their gaming experience, are game developers being limited to futuristic settings to satisfy those expectations?

Ethics and Video Games Part Two.

Video Game Teaching.

I got myself Bioschock Infinite. For those of you who haven't played it, Infinite is set is a pseudo American Anglo centric caricature of life in the US, around the turn of the century. For those of you well versed in history  that can mean a lot of things. But the developers emphasized theocratic and racist themes as definitive characteristics of "Columbia". 

When we look at video games, what we see is hugely important to the power we ascribe it. Are they just toys, in a sense no more effective then an action figure? Are they interactive learning tools that have implications for how we interact with the world? Are they art? Are they industry  Are they a movie with a bit more interaction? Are they something else completely?

Not a great movie to watch while high.

When we think of video games as something more then just entertainment, required justification of content becomes imperative. If we think back to the greatest films of this past century, Requiem for a Dream, Shindler's List, Shawshank redemption, 12 Angry Men, we sort of see a pattern: each of those movies has an important point being made. There are themes about morality, ethics, and social virtue, lessons being taught, and ideologies being promoted or critiqued in the movie. There is a justification, for the content. 

Bioshock Infinite is a perfect example of this. Class struggle, racial discrimination  totalitarian politics, theocracy, all these issues are being explored and explained through the game's environment. You get a sense that on a larger scale, other then your immediate objectives, there isn't justice in the world of Columbia. Those thoughts, those feelings are provocative and they can make your head spin. These are the same thought provoking feelings and thoughts that I get when I watch Good Will Hunting. 

The fact is, video games have a great way to expose us to new ideas and new thoughts. Hell, this is why I am paying to go to college: to get exposed to new ideas and change the way I think through situations. Video games have a great potential to do the same thing. There is a lot of positive aspects to this. But we can see some negatives. 

What happens when video games teach us bad things? Manhunt has us going around killing people in brutal and disgusting ways. This sort of mindless violence has to seep in somewhere right? We can't be effected positively by our experiences in Infinite's social justice message but be indifferent to extreme violence.

This is true for the most part. What we put into our heads, doesn't come out again. Once we've seen the violent images and gory business we can't unsee it. But does that mean that we need to be overly cautious with how we regulate and stigmatize video games?

In my opinion, no. 

Video games, like any other sort of media or art, has it's high points and it's low points. Movies like Saw (also Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, Saw V, and Saw VI) have no real philosophical point to them. Their entire purpose is to gross you out and make you cringe. And yet, there are seven of them. Seven. That's quite a few movies to be generated off the principle of a couple of thirteen year olds saying "Dude, know what'd be totally a sick torture method..."

Why didn't we see a sequel to this ground

breaking piece of work?

Even so, the movie industry is just that, an industry. It's there to make money and it responds to consumer demand. People want Saw movies, people get Saw movies. It's how the economy works. Same thing with video games. You want Manhunt? You can get Manhunt. You want Detective Barbie the game? You'll get Detective Barbie the game.

I don't blame the industry. And I'm going to go against gamer culture and say it isn't the fault of the parents. Parents have a lot on their plate right now. A bad economy, finding enough money for their kids to go to school, taking care of a thousand other things, it's not as simple as it ought to be. So how do we come to a compromise on effecting kids less, but still maintaining liberty in the gaming market?

Well we need to understand that it's a culture issue. It isn't as if kids these days are more drawn into video games because they are better then the outdoors. Kids are drawn into video games by social fragmentation. Social fragmentation comes when we have larger more geographically spread out communities. Things aren't as close knit as they were. Your school friends aren't your church friends, and those friends are different from your summer camp buddies, who are in turn removed from your sports teammates. It's a big strain to navigate the social landscape of all those groups. And with the invention of Facebook and twitter, we're bombarded with constant information about all these different groups, at once. When my dad was growing up, he had like five good friends who lived in his neighbor hood, went to his church, went to his school, and that was his community growing up. 

This is like cultural multitasking. And it isn't doing good for our youth. We can't expect to add in media and things, and be surprised when things get crazy. There is a reason why anxiety disorders are on the rise in America, and I doubt it has anything to do with video games.

And if video games isn't the problem, then they shouldn't be targeted as needing a solution.

Ethics and Video Game learning. Part one.

So it isn't at all possible that with the talks of gun control, right now that video games are going to be targeted as a source of over agressive and violent tendencies for youth right?

It's a topic of discussion in the past for legislators here in the US and around the world each nation has it's own views on the nature of violent video games. Germany, for instance, has banned the development of violent video games. They are of the opinion that the GDP isn't worth the effects that these products will have on their population.

All free market arguments aside, are video games teaching us to be more agressive and violent?

Well there hasn't been any data that really conclusively links the two. There are plenty of theories but nothing substantiated. However, if you look at what we know, we can see where people get the idea that videogames teach violence.

First of all, we know that active learning is better then passive learning. If you watch a video on how to make a radio, you wont learn nearly as much as if you actually made the radio with your own two hands. This is universal. So when a video game depicts violence, or situations in which violence is the solution to a problem, thus we are using a very powerful tool to teach kids to become gangbangers!!!!

That's a bit of an overestimation.

'Murica

It's a big leap to say that active learning in a fantasy virtual environment transferes over into real world scenarios. Just because I rob a guy in a game for his pistol ammo, doesn't mean that I'll go to the local supermarket and try the same thing. Thats the difference between fantasy and real life. Even in Grand Theft Auto, which I would argue is a fantasy game, where the enviornment seems to be realistic, we often don't find enough reality. I mean what police man lets a guy just walk down the street waving a gun everywhere? Even if it's legal (God bless America!) the police would still stop you and question you. Also, plenty of the situations are pretty far fetched in the game. I think the difference between the virtual reality and real life is not only discernable, but out right blatant.

We also know that violence in TV and movies desensitize youth to violence. The more they see it in casual settings the more familiar they become with it. This is actually pretty true for the most part. I mean when I was six my dad made me watch "Tombstone" with Kurt Russell. He said to my mother, who was entirely opposed to the idea, "I don't want my kid growing up to be some sissy." Well, it worked. I've never been squeamish about anything im my whole life. Blood, puke, poop, dead things have never bothered me. Now if we follow this line of thought, can't we say that violent video games could desensitize us to violence so much that the player would simply resort to violence at the first sign of trouble?

We don't see that is the case. What we actually see videogames doing is teaching problem solving skills. Violence is almost always an option in videogames, but often times the game provides incentives to avoid violence. If I could avoid a fight, I would because there was always loss associated with getting into a fight. Either I'd use up some precious equipment, or I'd lose health, or my gear would get damaged. Violence, while it may be an option, isn't alway the best option. Violence takes a back seat to other forms of conflict mediation. And game developers know this. We see RPG's making use of more and more diplomatic dialogue options. The progression of Videogames has not been violent situations to even more violent situations, the progression has deescalated the violence in many situations. Who remembers speech checking the Legate out of invading the NCR? I bet a few of us made a new character in New Vegas to do just that.

Part two coming up in a week!